A portal web site is a site that offers users a central location from which to manage their surfing. The portal web site has links to many of the preferred destinations of the users, and offers tools to simplify their use of the Internet.
Since the first portal web sites were established, their numbers have continued to increase. The incentive behind creating a portal web site is typically financial, both direct and indirect. By having a “captive” audience (captive in the sense that the users typically do not actively seek out alternative portal web sites), advertising revenue is more certain. In addition, the portal web sites can direct users to services that return a greater profit to the owner of the portal web site (either by being a service offered by the owner of the portal web site or by some sort of arrangement with the service provider).
Regardless of which portal web site a customer uses, much of the content the customer typically wants is the same. For example, local, national, and international news are common themes in portal web sites, as are local weather information and sports scores. Only highly specialized portal web sites tend to vary from this norm. Thus, regardless of which portal web site a customer actually uses, the content presented by the portal web site is similar to the content on another portal web site.
Since much of the content offered via different portal web sites is similar, centralization of the content has obvious advantages. If there are fewer sources of content, there are fewer sources that need to be updated (for example, to improve the appearance of the content). Gadgets offer a way to simplify the maintenance and construction of portal web sites. A gadget is a piece of content that can be displayed on a content page. A gadget can occupy the entire page, or it can be only one element of the content page. For example, consider FIG. 1, which shows content page 105. On content page 105 are four gadgets. Weather gadget 110 displays weather forecasts for certain cities, News gadget 115 displays some news headlines to the user, Sports gadget 120 offers links to the latest sports information, and Portfolio gadget 125 gives information about stocks and the major markets. Gadgets 110-125 are all independent, and each can be displayed on a content page independent of any of the others. In this way, the content provider can enable users to select pieces of content that are of interest, and eliminate pieces not of interest. For example, one user might only be interested in News and Portfolio, whereas another user might be interested in only Sports and Weather. Each of these sections (Weather, News, Sports, and Portfolio), if treated as gadgets, can be managed separately and combined for the user as desired. The content provider has the responsibility to combine the content from the gadgets to display to the user. Thus, the content provider is responsible for combining the content from gadgets 110-125 onto a single content page. Gadgets are discussed further in related U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/119,784, titled “Method and Apparatus For Controlling Access to Portal Content From Outside the Portal,” filed Apr. 9, 2002, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
FIG. 2 shows a schematic of a client access data through a portal web site using gadgets in the prior art. In FIG. 2, client 205 accesses portal web site 210, which happens to be stored on portal server 215 in storage 217. Portal web site 210 includes two gadgets, 220 and 225, which are not stored on portal server 215, but are stored elsewhere. For example, gadget 220 is copied from gadget server 230 as gadget 235, stored in storage 237. Portal web site 210 requests a copy of gadget 235 from gadget server 230, and uses gadget 235 in displaying content drawn from content source 240 to the user. Similarly, gadget 225 can be used to display content from content source 245 (the gadget server storing gadget 225 is not shown in FIG. 2).
Although FIG. 2 shows all the devices being directly connected, typically client 205, portal server 215, gadget server 230, and content sources 240 and 245 are connected by one or more networks not shown in FIG. 2. In addition, a person skilled in the art will recognize that the terms portal server and gadget server are not meant to suggest that machines involved are in any way specialized. They are computers, capable of carrying out particular functions as described herein, but also possibly capable of carrying out other functions. For example, portal server 215 often is a web server offering content to users outside of the portal setting. Similarly, gadget server 230 is not necessarily a server dedicated to providing gadgets to portal web sites: this may simply be one function performed by gadget server 230. In the remainder of this document, the terms portal server and gadget server are intended to refer to the server hosting the portal web site and the server storing gadgets used by the portal web site on the portal server, respectively.
One problem with using gadgets that are remote to the server hosting the portal web site lies in their appearance. The appearance of each portal web site is typically unique to that portal web site. For example, one portal web site might present its content using a particular font or color, different from another portal web site. Or one portal web site might use a particular iconography (symbols for buttons, such as the buttons for scroll bars, minimize and maximize buttons (which enlarge or minimize the display of content), or buttons to eliminate a particular piece of content) peculiar to the portal web site. But the presentation of content in the gadget is determined by the gadget, meaning that the gadget determines the color, font, iconography, etc. If the portal web site uses a presentation scheme different from that used by the gadget, the gadget ruins the coordinated look of the portal web site.
Although in FIG. 2 gadget 235 is coded using eXtensible Markup Language (XML), before gadget 235 is sent to portal server 215 the gadget is rendered to HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This is shown in FIG. 3. In FIG. 3, gadget 235 is rendered to HTML using rendering engine 325, which is stored on gadget server 230. The rendered gadget 305 is then sent to portal server 215.
Once the gadget has been received by portal server 215, portal server 215 can customize the gadget. In the past, customization was accomplished by performing a search and replace operation on rendered gadget 305 (the version of the gadget coded in HMTL). Portal server 215 would locate particular strings in rendered gadget 305 that needed to be customized and replace them with the customized strings for the portal web site. As shown in FIG. 3, portal server 215 uses substitution engine 330 to substitute the appropriate replacement values in rendered gadget 305. The result of this substitution is specialized gadget 310. Only then could portal server 215 use specialized gadget 310 as part of the portal web site. But this process, especially the search and replace, is very expensive to perform.
A need remains for a way to share content across portal web sites while maintaining a customized look that addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art.